The rise and contradictory politics of Bal Keshav Thackeray

The Shiv Sena was born almost two decades after Independence. Bal Thackeray, who was then the young founder and cartoonist of a satirical magazine Marmik, later recalled its low-key launch on June 19, 1966: “At around 9.30 in the morning, one of our family friends, Naik, brought a coconut from the grocery store and broke it. And intoning ‘Chhatrapati Shivaji Ki Jai’ we started the Shiv Sena.” Not being particularly religious then, he didn’t bother to check if the time was auspicious or not.

In the nearly two decades, a new generation had come of age in India. They were young people for whom the nationalist movement was already history and for whom Partition, rather than being a personally-felt calamity, meant the birth of a menacing neighbour. The project of nation-building now mattered less to them than more local concerns of jobs and lifestyle. More of them lived in cities, and more were educated and wanted work to match.

But in 1966, political parties hardly seemed to notice this. The Congress was mostly consumed with the succession politics that followed the death of Lal Bahadur Shastri in January. The election of Indira Gandhi as prime minister only papered over the cracks, and her need to consolidate and deal with crises, like the failure of the monsoon, meant there was hardly likely to be much change from the government’s socialistic, rural-focused policies. The main opposition, particularly in urban, industrialised areas, came from the Leftist parties whose control of unions made them a potent force. But their thinking tended to be too rigidly defined by ideology, and their focus was on unions; so they had little to offer educated, non-unionised youths.

The Hindu Right parties, like the Jan Sangh, were shaking off the faint taint of association with Gandhi’s assassination, but were bogged down by issues like the anti cowslaughter agitation that were emotive, but limited in their appeal.

The one political movement that had enthused the new generation was the demand for linguistic states. This had empowered regional parties like the DMK and Akali Dal, but in Maharashtra, the energies of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement were divided between the Left, which dominated the grouping called the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti, and the Congress, which despite earlier opposing the division of Bombay, now took the lead in commemorating the struggle and idolising Shivaji.

This was the political vacuum into which Bal Thackeray stepped. He has been praised and vilified so extravagantly that it is hard finding any agreement on his achievements, but perhaps one consensus could be that he was a brilliant political innovator. He created an entirely new type of politics perfectly aimed at the new generation of the sixties, the particular circumstances of Mumbai and perhaps a cynical estimation of what modern political parties could aim for and achieve.

Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, a professor of political studies in the US, who studied and wrote about the formative years of the Sena, saw an early example of the Sena’s difference in October 1970, a couple of days before a by-election to the Parel Assembly seat in Mumbai. This was needed because the sitting MLA, a popular Communist Party of India (CPI) member named Krishna Desai, had been stabbed to death on June 5 that year. When caught, the perpetrators turned out to have Sena associations, but no link to Thackeray was ever proven.

Being possibly linked to the murder didn’t stop the Sena from contesting for Desai’s seat in a head-on battle with the Left. The CPI fielded Desai’s widow Sarojini, who was supported by other left parties and the now-split Congress headed by Indira Gandhi. The Sena fielded Wamanrao Mahadik and was supported by right-leaning parties like the business-oriented Swatantra, the Jan Sangh and Hindu Mahasabha, and the Congress faction opposed to Mrs Gandhi.

On that day in October, Katzenstein first visited the Sena office where the mood was jubilant and already victorious. The office was packed with excited workers, most of them, Katzenstein wrote in her book Ethnicity and Equality, “young boys in their teens and early twenties. Constant chatter – all in Marathi – jokes, and an occasional excited command filled the office.” She writes that the mood was almost like a sporting contest, with workers declaiming: “We’ll show them – the red flag will never fly again in Bombay.”

The CPI office was a complete contrast. “A half-dozen workers sat around a table; several others stood in an adjoining room… The workers were almost all in their forties and fifties.” Unlike the Sena workers, who were nearly all men, this included several women. The mood was sober and uninterested in campaign tactics like running-down the other party. Instead, writes Katzenstein, “a tense discussion was struck up about the historical role of the party in the Bombay trade union movement.” She was struck by how the members could disagree, even vehemently, which never happened with the Sena.

When the votes came in, the Sena’s confidence was proved well-founded, since Mahadik won, becoming the party’s first MLA. It was a very narrow victory, by just 1,679 votes, but the Sena behaved like a winner, even before it won. The victory also showed that the aura of violence associated with the party was not a hindrance, and might even help. It also showed that the Sena could take on the Communists, even in their industrial heartland of Parel, and win. But above all, it showed that Thackeray’s politics of excitement and drama could motivate the new generation.

It probably helped that Thackeray was by training a visual artist: he could develop a commanding and distinctive visual identity for the party. The logo of a snarling tiger, the bow and arrow emblem, the saffron-coloured swallow-tail flag and the later design of shakhas or local offices in the shape of small forts — all helped create a thrilling, war-like identity for the party. Katzenstein notes how, from the start, money was never stinted on materials for rallies and displays. She estimates an early rally had 50,000 flags at a cost of Rs10 each, which added up to a really substantial figure at that time.

The party’s success in taking on the unions was not lost on Mumbai’s industrialists and anecdotal evidence exists to show that many donated to the party. Communist cartoons at that time bitterly attack the Sena as an instrument of elite interests. Katzenstein notes that the Birlas and Mahindras were often cited as sources of funding, but others also may have donated. In the 1967 Lok Sabha elections, the Sena supported Congress’ Harish Mahindra in the Bombay Central South seat, which he lost by only 7,000 votes.

Thackeray had earlier attacked many of these large companies for not hiring Maharashtrians, but both sides saw no problem in coming together for mutual benefit. This willingness to form strategic alliances was, in fact, to become a key part of Thackeray’s politics. His confrontational style demanded a constant stream of enemies who would be vilified with all the vigour and venom he had cultivated as a professional satirist, yet if it suited his interests, he could work with the same targets. For Thackeray, party interests, which were not differentiated from personal interests, counted for all.

South Indians, for example, were his first targets and at one point, in Marmik he referred to Coorg as a place “where human beings do not live. Wild Satans live there…” Yet when General Cariappa, a Coorgi, came to Mumbai to stand for the Lok Sabha in 1971, Thackeray supported him. In early years, the Sena often supported the Congress, which overlooked its long-term threat, in favour of its short-term value against the Left. The Sena benefitted by a curious lack of prosecutions for its many transgressions of the law, but when the time came, the Congress was dumped and made into its primal enemy – except when the Sena’s help was needed, as with Pratibha Patil’s Presidential election.

Some of these contradictory stands were tactical – Thackeray clearly relished keeping people uncertain and on the edge about what he might say next. It underlined his maverick status and also effectively forestalled the rise of rivals. Thomas Blom Hansen in Wages of Violence, his study of the Sena, noted how he ruled “by alternately extending and withdrawing his attention and affection and making sure that no one feels entirely comfortable with his position…. This creates a permanent atmosphere of uneasy surprise, where followers at various levels strive for Thackeray’s attention.” No Sena leader was ever entirely sure of where he stood with Thackeray, and workers had to keep their focus on him alone.

But some of the contradictions also stemmed from a shrewd reading of what his supporters really wanted. In the Sena’s very first manifesto, drawn up just a month after it started, there is among the expected exhortations to support Maharashtrian interests in all ways, one tenet that reads: “Young Marathi-speaking boys should develop excellent communication skills in the English language, and learn English steno-typing as well.” This would seem to fly in the face of the Sena’s insistence of the primacy of Marathi, but in fact is a practical acknowledgement that to advance in modern middle-class jobs, English skills were a must. Thackeray understood that his followers were aspirational and needed a boost, but not a futile attempt to change reality.

This practical focus distinguished Thackeray from other parochial politicians, like those in the North, who tend to get distracted by logical consistency. He saw no contradiction in welcoming a western star like Michael Jackson but opposing western culture in the form of Valentine’s Day. The one was entertainment, which Thackeray knew the value of, while the second was loss of social control, especially over women, and that was not to be allowed. Thackeray understood the Indian middle class desire to be both superficially modern, yet rootedly conservative and if this made for an inherently unstable combination, he simply ignored the results. He never wasted much time in reflection, preferring instinctive reactions, a precursor perhaps to the short attention spans of the digital age.

He was also a precursor in the value he placed on personal appearance. As a cartoonist Thackeray knew how to focus on a few elements and these he presented to view. There were the large glasses, for example, which framed his eyes for maximum effect and the shock of jet black hair, though in the end this was allowed to grey. His earliest pictures show him in the plain pants and white shirt of a working professional, but soon after the launch of the party this shifted to expensive looking sherwani style coats. The khadi that faux-poor politicians wore was not his style, but he also stopped short of going to the other extreme of a Western-style suit.

Later on, when many other politicians adopted his style, he stayed distinctive by abandoning it for his saffron robes. The visual always came first with Thackeray, which also explains his instinctive empathy with Bollywood – and also why he was willing to victimise a visual artist like M.F.Hussain, who had never attacked him personally, while ignoring a literary artist like Salman Rushdie, who satirised him quite directly in The Moor’s Last Sigh. He knew that his followers couldn’t be bothered to read a book, while an art gallery was easier to attack. For someone who probably never sent an email, updated a Facebook profile or sent a tweet, he had an unnervingly strong sense of what would work in visually driven, short attention span age.

Suketu Mehta in his book Maximum City tells the story of a Sena meeting in 1984 to which Thackeray invited the veteran communist leader SA Dange (who defeated Harish Mahindra in 1967). The communists might have been anathema to the Sena, but Dange commanded personal respect for his more nationalist politics and as a Maharashtrian leader. But when invited to address the meeting, Dange spoke his mind: “The Shiv Sena does not have a theory, and it is impossible for an organisation to survive sans a theory.” Thackeray’s response was devastating: “How is it that, despite a theory, your organisation is finished?”

Much has been made in his obituaries about how, for all his emphasis on Maharashtrian pride, he never really made a deep impact in interior Maharashtra, but remained so focussed on Mumbai that, according to some journalists who interviewed him, he had a hazy grasp on the very geography of his state. But that would have meant immersing in the tedious politics of sugar mills and co-operative banks, and why bother when there was the constant, everchanging stimulus of his city. In the end, as much as Thackeray created – and named – Mumbai, he was also a creation of it, born and shaped by a city that values survival, at any cost or contradiction, above all.